Rants and Raves on Espresso

On Friday, The Republican (Springfield, MA) reported on a recent, local case of daughter-mother domestic abuse: Counseling ordered in ‘poisoned coffee’ case – Breaking News – MassLive.com. On the surface, the story is your typical police blotter fodder. But peel back a layer, and it raises all sorts of questions about what really goes into a can of Big Four coffee — and questions about the people who drink it regularly.

The short of it is that a 19-year-old daughter maliciously added Love My Carpet® carpet & room deodorizer to her mother’s can of Maxwell House coffee. A regular Maxwell House drinker, the mother “had been experiencing stomach upset for about a month prior to her daughter being arrested.” She thus apparently continued to drink her daily cup of Maxwell House, oblivious to any taste, smell, or other sensory differences introduced by a big dose of Love My Carpet® non-dairy creamer.

The sad story of domestic abuse is scary enough. But scarier still is the notion that a regular coffee drinker cannot tell the difference between Maxwell House and a carpet & room deodorizer. But I’m still not sure if this story says more about the quality of Maxwell House coffee or the taste buds of loyal Maxwell House drinkers, or both.

Under these circumstances, does Maxwell House’s recent announcement of their switch to 100% arabica beans really make a difference? Especially if we can secretly replace Maxwell House with Love My Carpet® — just as Folgers Crystals did to “fancy restaurant coffee” decades ago. I’m just waiting for the Love My Carpet® latte recipes…

Speaking of Folgers and fancy restaurant coffee, here’s a TV commercial clip from 1989, espousing the virtues of Folgers Crystals in place of coffee from “San Francisco’s Coffee Cantata gourmet coffee house”:

I believe this reference is to the one and the same Cantata Coffee on Upper Haight Street — which has quietly labored as an independent purveyor of fresh roasted beans for decades. The video shoot is obviously from nowhere near the Cantata, as it’s hard to merge the images in this video with Haight St. teen skate punks begging for change and a swearing street person marinating on the sidewalk in his own urine.